Holiday Games

This weekend was our wedding anniversary so, as is traditional, we went away for a few days. I didn't take any miniatures to play with, but did take my galleys to work on, managing to complete the modifications I wanted to make as well as plot out some new designs.

However just because there were no miniatures didn't mean that there weren't games to be played.

Actually the first game in this post was from our trip away, but a day or so before. We try to have at least one boardgame session each week after our tea, and on Wednesday Maya introduced us to Quacks of Quedlinburg.

Quacks is a push your luck game where each player is a maker of potions competing with other makers of potions in an annual competition. Over a series of rounds you stir various randomly determined ingredients from your supply into your pot, with each ingredient having some kind of special ability. At the end of the round you score points based on how full your pot is, and can buy new ingredients to add to your stock. As the game progresses you get access to better and better ingredients.

The downside is that some of the ingredients are unstable, and if you hit a certain threshold of these your pot explodes, reducing your scoring opportunities for the round.

One thing we noticed about the game is that there is virtually no opportunity to interact with the other players. Essentially you are playing a series of rounds on your own, looking to get the highest possible score. There is a rather neat mechanism which gives a bonus to players who are not in the lead - you get a bigger bonus the further behind you are, but that's really about it, and it's not something you can really exploit to affect another person. It was fun to play, though, and, like Sushi Go Party, is a configurable game, with each ingredient having four possible special abilities, so you can mix and match them to create variations in gameplay.

As a new game this year, Quacks counts towards my 52 Games project.

On to the holiday games. We started off with Codenames, since Catherine was keen to play some more of this, even two-player, where it's really a cooperative puzzle. We played in the local pub, interrupted only by the arrival of our food and the pub's decision to shut early because there weren't any customers but us.

I'll confess we had a couple of disastrous games; one where we managed a minimal win, and one where we completely failed to complete the grid. These were made up for by two excellent victories though. In this one Catherine was giving out the clues: 

And in this one I doled out the information, leading Catherine to a win in three turns.

Back in our hotel room we played Love Letter, since we always take that on holiday. I didn't get aby photos of that, but this is the first time we've played it this year, so it counts as one of my 52 Games. We played two games. I won the first 7-5, whilst Catherine romped to a 7-4 victory in the next game.

Our final game was Rhino Hero, a kind of reverse Jenga where the players build a wobbly apartment building out of cards and a rather heavy rhino superhero climbs up it. You win if the other person collapses the building, or if you get rid of all of the cards in your hand first. 

We played several games of this, as it's quick.

Here's the early stages. Some of the cards have special abilities - they can cause the other player to draw more cards, miss a turn or have to move Rhino Hero up a level or two.

Here's Rhino Hero. It's a wooden piece, so his weight can really make a difference to the stability of the building.

Catherine collapses the building!

But she soon got the hang of the game. Here she has just ditched all of her cards and completed a tower eleven wobbly stories high.

And her greatest triumph - thirteen stories.

We had a good time playing it (the wine we were drinking helped) but the card abilities don't work too well with just two players - you really need three or four people to get the most out of this game. It might not be too hard to create a two-player variant, though.

Anyway, Rhino Hero was another addition to my 52 Games.

The rest of the holiday involved exploring local towns, buying an eating cheese and wandering around beaches and bits of coastline. All very pleasant.

52 Games - Game 17

52 Games - Game 18

52 Games - Game 19